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INTRODUCTION 

TO 



SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS 

AND MYTHS 



Collected hy 

JEREMIAH CURTIN and J. N. R. HEWITT 

Edited by 
J. N. B. HEWITT 



Reprinted from the Thirty-second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 




WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1919 






e; H ifm' 

m 23 1919 



SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS. AND MYTHS 



Collected by Jeremiah Curtin and J. N. B. Hewitt ; edited by J. N. B. EIewitt 



T 



INTRODUCTION 

The Seneca 

HE following brief description of the Seneca is taken, with 
slight alterations, from the article on that tribe in the Hand- 
book of American Indians : 



The Seneca {=Plttce of the Stone) are a noted and influential tribe of the 
Iroquois, or the so-called Five Nations of New York. When first known they 
occupied a region in central New York, lying between the western watershed 
of the Genesee r. and the lands of the Cayuga about Seneca lake, having their 
council fire at Tsonoutowan, near Naples, in Ontario co. After the political 
destruction of the Erie and Neuters, aliout the middle of the 17th cen- 
tury, the Seneca and other Iroquois people carried their settlements west- 
ward to L. Erie and southward along the Alleghany into Pennsylvania. They 
are now settled chiefly on the Allegany. Cattaraugus, and Tonawanda res., N. Y., 
and some live on Grand River res., Ontario. Various local bands have been 
known as Buffalo, Tonawanda, and Cornphinter Indians; and the Mingo, for- 
merly in Ohio, have become otBcially known as Seneca from the large number 
of that tribe among them. 

In the third quarter of the 16th century the Seneca was the last but one of 
the Iroquois tril)es to give its suffrage in favor of the abolition of murder and 
war, the suppression of cannibalism, and the establishment of the principles 
upon which the League of the Iroquois was founded. However, a large division 
of the tribe did not adopt at once the course of the main body, but, on obtain- 
ing coveted privileges and prerogatives, the recalcitrant body was admitted as a 
constituent member in the structure of the League. The two chiefships last 
added to the quota of the Seneca were admitted on condition of their exercising 
functions belonging to a sergeant-at-arms of a modern legislative body as well 
as tho.se belonging to a modern secretary of state for foreign affairs, in addition 
to their duties as fedenil chieftains; indeed, they became the warders of the 
famous " Great Black Doorway " of the League of the Iroquois, called 
Ka'nhn'fnradjVpo'na' by the Onondaga. 

In historical times the Seneca have been by far the most populous of the five 
tribes originally composing the League of the Iroquois. The Seneca belong in 
the federal organization to the tribal phratry known by the political name 
Hon<ionnis"}u"'. meaning, ' they are clansmen of the fathers,' of which the 
Mohawk are the other member, when the tribes are organized as a federal 
council ; but when ceremonially organized the Onondaga also belong to this 
phratry. In the federal council the Seneca are represented by eight 
federal chiefs, but two of these were added to the original six present 

43 



44 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 32 

at the first federal council, to give representation to that part of the trilte which 
had at first refused to join the League. Since the organization of the League 
of the Iroquois, approximately in the third quarter of the 16th ceutury, the 
number of Seneca clans, which are organized into two phratries for the per- 
formance of both ceremonial and civil functions, have varied. The names of 
the following nine have been recorded: Wolf, Horinat'haiion'ni' ; Bear, Hodi- 
djionni'ga'; Beaver, nodige'^'fiega' ; Turtle, Hadinia''deiV; Hawk, Hadis'hwe""- 
gaiiu'; Sandpiper, Hodi'ne'si'iu', sometimes also called Snipe, Plover, and 
Killdee; Deer, Hadimonguaiiu' ; Doe, Hodi)io"''dcoga', sometimes Hounont'- 
goHdjc"; Heron, Hodidaio""ga\ In a list of clan names made in 1S38 by Gen. 
Dearborn from information given him by Mr Cone, an interpreter of the Tona 
wanda baud, the Heron clan is called the Swan clan with the native name 
given above. Of these clans only five had an unequal representation in the 
federal council of the League; namely, the Sandpiper, three, the Turtle, two, 
the Hawk, one, the Wolf, one, and the Bear, one. 

One of the earliest known references to the ethnic name Seneca is that on 
the Original Carte Figurative, annexed to the Memorial presented to the States- 
General of the Netherlands, Aug. IS, IGIG, on which it appears with the Dutch 
plural as Sennecas. This map is remarkable also for ths first known mention 
of the ancient Erie, sometimes called Gahkwas or Kahkwah ; on this map they 
appear uader the name last cited, Gachoi (ch = kh), and were placed on the n. 
side of the w. branch of the Susquehanna. The name did not originally belong 
to the Seneca, but to the Oneida, as the following lines will show. 

In the early part of December, 3634, three Dutchmen made a journey (the 
itinerary of which was duly recorded in a Journal ') in the interests of the fur- 
trade from Fort Orange, now Albany, N. Y., to the Mohawk and the " Sinne- 
kens " to thwart French intrigue there. Strictly speaking, the latter name desig- 
nated the Oneida, but at this time it was a general name, usually comprising tlie 
Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, in addition. At that period the Dutch 
and the French commonly divided the Five Iroquois tribes into two identical 
groups ; to the first, the Dutch gave the name Maquas (Mohawk), and to the lat- 
ter, Sinnekens (Seneca, the final -ens being the Dutch genitive plural), with the 
connotation of the four tribes mentioned above. The French gave to the lat 
ter group the general name " les Iroquois Superieurs ", " les Hiroquois d'eu 
haut "', i. e. the Upper Iroquois, " les Hiroquois des pays plus hauts, nommes Son- 
touaheronnons " (literally, 'the Iroquois of the upper country, called Sontoua- 
heronnons'), the latter being only another form of "les Tsonnontouans" (the 
Seneca) ; and to the first group the desigaations "les Iroquois inferieurs " (the 
Lower Iroquois), and "les Hiroquois d'en has, nomm#s Agnechronnons " (the 
Mohawk; literally, 'the Iroquois from below, named Agnechronnons'). This 
geographical rather than political division of the Iroquois tribes, first made by 
Champlain and the early Dutch at Ft Orange, prevailed until about the third 
quarter of the 17th ceutury. Indeed, Governor Andros, two years after Green- 
halgh's visit to the several tribes of the Iroquois in 1677, still wrote, " Ye 
Oneidas deemed ye first nation of sineques." The Journal of the Dutchmen. 

••The raamiscript cit this .Tournal was discovprod in Amsterdam In ISO-o by the late Gen. 
James Grant Wilson, who published it in the Annual Report of the American Historical 
Assoeiation ^ov the year 1895, under the caption " Arcnt Van Curler And His .Tournal of 
1634-35." But the Tan Rensselaer Bojcicr Manuscripts, edited by the learned Mr. A. J. 
F. van Laer, show that van Curler coold not have made the journey, as he did not reach 
Rensselaerswyclc until 1637, then a youth of only eighteen. It seems probable that 
Marmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, the surgeon of the fort, was the author of the 
Journal. Consult the Introduction to this same .Journal as published in *• Narratives of 
New Netherland, 1600-1604," ed. by J Franklin .Tameson, in Original Narratives of Early 
American History (Charles Scribner's Sons. New York, lOOD). 



HEwiTr] INTEODUCTION 45 

mentioned above, records the interesting fact that during their visit to the tribes 
they celebrated the New Year of 1635 at a place called Enneyuttchaga or Sinne- 
kens. The first of these names was the Iroquois, and the second, the Mohegan, 
name for the place, or, preferably, the Mohegan translation of the Iroquois name. 
The Dutch received their first knowledge of the Iroquois tribes through the 
Mohegan. The name Enncytitteliiifia is evidently written for Oneriiiitc'aga''ge\ 
'at the place of the people of the standing (projecting) stone.' At that date 
ihis was the chief town of the Oneida. The Dutch Journal identifies the name 
Sinnckens with this town, which is presumptive evidence that it is the Mohegan 
rendering of the Iroquois local name Onin'iute', 'it is a standing or projecting 
stone', employed as an ethnic appellative. The derivation of Sinnekens from 
Mohegan appears to be as follows: a'sinni, 'a stone, or rock', -ika or -iga, de- 
notive of ' place of ', or ' abundance of ', and the final -ens supplied by the 
Dutch genitive plural ending, the whole Mohegan synthesis meaning ' place of 
the standing stone"; and with a suitable pronominal affix, like o- or too-, which 
was not recorded by the Dutch writers, the translation signifies, ' they are of 
the place of the standing stone.' This etymology is confirmed by the Delaware 
name, W'tassone, for the Oneida, which has a similar derivation. The initial 
w- represents approximately an o-sound. and is the affi.x of verbs and nouns 
denotive of the third person; the intercalary -/- is merely euphonic, being em- 
ployed to prevent the coalescence of the two vowel sounds ; and it is evident 
that assone is only another form of a'sinni, ' stone ', cited above. Hence it 
appears that the Mohegan and Delaware names for the Oneida are cognate in 
derivation and identical in signification. Heckewelder erroneously translated 
W'tassone by ' stone pipe makers.' 

Thus, the Iroquois Onctiiutc'a'gd', the Mohegan Sinnekens, and the Delawave 
W'tassone are synonymous and are homologous in derivation. But the Dutch, 
followed by other Europeans, used the Mohegan term to designate a group of 
four tribes, to only one of which, the Oneida, was it strictly applicable. The 
name Sinnctcens, or Sennccaas (Visscher's map, ca. 1660), became the tribal 
name of the Seneca by a process of elimination which excluded from the group 
and from the connotation of the general name the nearer tribes as each with 
its own proper native name became known to the Europeans. Obviously, the 
last remaining tribe of the group would finally acquire as its own the general 
name of the group. The Delaware name for the Seneca was ilexaxtin'ni (the 
Maechachtinni of Heckewelder), which signifies 'great mountain ' r this is, of 
course, a Delaware rendering of tlie Iroquois name for the Seneca, Djiionondo- 
wdneiVakd', or Djiionondoioanen'ronno'", 'People of the Great Mountain.' 
This name appears disguised as Trudamani (Cartier, 1534-35), Entoiihonoions, 
Chouontouarouon^Chonontouaionon (Champlain, 1G15) , Oiicntoiiaronuns 
(Champlain, 1627), and Tsonontouan or Sonontouan (Jes. Rel., passim). 

Previous to the defeat and despoliation of the Neuters in 1651 and the Erie in 
1656, the Seneca occupied the territory drained by Genesee r., eastward to the 
lands of the Cayuga along the line of the watershed between Seneca and Cayuga 
lakes. 

The political history of the Seneca is largely that of the League of the 
Iroquois, although owing to petty jealousies among the various tribes the 
Seneca, like, the others, sometimes acted independently in their dealings with 
aliens. But their independent action appears never to have been a serious and 
deliberate rupture of the bonds uniting them with the federal government of 
the League, thus vindicating the wisdom and foresight of its founders in per- 
mitting every tribe to retain and exercise a large measure of autonomy in the 
structure of the federal government. It was sometimes appareiltly imperative 



46 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 32 

that one of tbe tribes should enter into ii treaty or other compact with its 
enemies, while the others might still maintain a hostile attitude toward the 
alien contracting party. 

During 1622 the Montagnais, the Algonkin, and the Hurons sought to con- 
clude peace with the Iroquois (IYo(7!toJs= Mohawk division?), because "they 
were weary and fatigued with the wars which they had had for more than 50 
years." The armistice was concluded in 1G24, but was broken by the continued 
guerrilla warfare of the Algonkin warriors; for this reason the Seneca (" Ouen- 
touoronons d'autre nation, amis desdits Yrocois") killed in the "village of the 
Yrocois " the embassy composed of a Frenchman, Pierre Maguan, and three 
Algonquian ambassadors. This resulted in the renewal of the war. So in Sept 
1627, the Iroquois, including the Seneca, declared war against the Indians and 
the French on the St. Lawrence and its northern affluents by sending various 
parties of warriors against them. 

From the Jesuit Relation for 1635 (p. 34. 1858) it is learned that the Seneca, 
after defeating tbe Hurons in tbe spring of 1634, made peace with tbcm. The 
Hurons in the following year sent an embassy to Sonontouan, the chief town of 
the Seneca, to ratify the peace, and while there learned that the Onondaga, tbe 
Oneida, tbe Cayuga, and the Mohawk were desirous of becoming parties to tbe 
treaty. 

In 1639 tbe war was renewed by tlie Hurons, who in May captured 12 pris- 
oners from the Seneca, then regarded as a powerful people. The war continued 
with varying success. Tbe Jesuit Relation for 1641 (p. 75, 1858) says the Seneca 
were tbe most feared of the enemies of the Hurons, and that they were only one 
day's journey from Ongninahra (Niagara), tbe most easterly town of tbe 
Neutens.' The Relation for 1643 (p. 61) .says that the Seneca (i. e. " les Hiro- 
quois d'en haut"), including the Cayuga, the Oneida, and the Onondaga, 
equaled, if they did not exceed. In number and power tbe Hurons, who pre- 
viously had had this advantage : and that the Mohawk at this time bad three 
villages with 700 or 800 men of arras who possessed 300 arquebuses that they 
had obtained from tbe Dutch and which they used with skill and boldness. 
According to the Jesuit Relation for 1648 (p. 49, 1858), 300 Seneca attacked 
the village of the Aondironnon, and killed or captured as many of its inhab- 
itants as possible, although this people were a dependency of tbe Neuters who 
■wore at peace with the Seneca at this time. This affront nearly precipitated 
war between the Iroquois and the Neuters.' 

The Seneca warriors eomixised the birger part of the Iroquois warriors who 
in 1048-49 assailed, destroyed, and disper.sed the Huron tribes; it was likewise 
they who in 1649 sacked the chief towns of the Tionontati, or Tobacco tribe ; 
and the Seneca also took a leading part in the defeat f.nd subjugation of the 
Neuters in 1651 and of the Erie in 1656. From Ibe Journal des PP. Jesuites 
for 1651-52 (Jes. Rel., Tbwaites' ed., xxxvii, 97, LSOS) it is learned that in 1651 
the .Seneca, in waging war against the Neuters, had been so signally defeated 
that their women and children were compelled to flee from Sonoutowan, their 
capital, to seek refuge ••iniong tbe neighboring Cayuga. 

• This villaKe of Ongniaahra (Ongiara, Onguiaara, and Sndgiara are other forms found 
In the literature of the Jesuit Fathers) was situated very probably on or near the site of 
the village of Youngstown, New York. It is the present Iroquoian name of this village, 
but not of the river nor of the Falls of Niagara. 

- The Aondironnon probably dwelt at or near the present Moraviantown, Ontario, 
Canada, although some Iroquois apply the name to St. Thomas, some distance eastward. 
Another form of the name is Ahondihronnon. The nominal part that is distinctive is thus 
Aondi or Ahondin, as written in the Jesuit Rrtations. The modern Iroquoian form Is 
(".Whl", ' The middle or center of the peninsula.' 



CCETIN,"] INTRODUCTION 47 

HEWITT J 

In lfiri2 the Seneca were plotting with the Mohawk to destroy and ruin the 
French settlements on the St. Lawrence. Two ye.irs later the Seneca sent an 
embassy to the French for the purpose of making peace with them, a movement 
which was probably brought about by their rupture with the Erie. But the 
Mohawk not desiring peace at that time with the French, perhaps on account of 
their desire to attack the Hurons on Orleans id., murdered two of the three 
Seneca ambassadors, the other having remained as a hostage witli the French. 
This act almost resulted in war between the two hostile tribes; foreign affairs, 
however, were in such condition as to prevent the beginning of actual hostility. 
On Sept. 19, 1655, Fathers Chauraonot and Dablon, after pressing invitations to 
do so, started from Quebec to visit and view the Peneca country, and to estab- 
lish there a French habitation and teach the Seneca the articles of their faith. 

In 1657 the Seneca, in carrying out the policy of (he League to adopt conquered 
tribes upon submission and the expre.ssion of a desire to live under the form of 
government established by the League, had thus incorporated eleven different 
tribes into their body politic. 

In 16.'52 Maryland bought from the Minqua,.or Susquehanna Indians, i. e. the 
Conestoga. all their land claims on both sides of Chesapeake bay up to the 
mouth of Susquehanna r. In 1663, SOO Seneca and Cayuga warriors from the 
Confederation of the Five Nations were defeated by the Minqua, aided by the 
Marylanders. The Iroquois did not terminate their hostilities until famine had 
so reduced the Conestoga that in 1675, when the Marylanders had disagreed 
with them and had withdrawn their alliance, the Conestoga were completely 
subdued by the Five Nations, who thereafter claimed a right to the Minqua 
lands to the head of Chesapeake bay. 

In 1744 the influence of the French was rapidly gaining ground among the 
Seneca : meanwhile the astute and persuasive Col. Johnson was gradually win- 
ning the Mohawk as close allies of the British, while the Onondaga, the Cayuga, 
and the Oneida, under strong pressure from Pennsylvania and Virginia, sought 
to be neutral. 

In 16S6, 200 Seneca warriors went w. against the Miami, the Illinois in the 
meantime having been overcome by the Iroquois in a war lasting about five 
years. In 1687 the Marquis Denonville assembled a great horde of Indians 
from the region of the upper lakes and from the St. Lawrence — Hurons, Ot- 
taw.'i. Chippewa, Missisauga. Miami. Illinois, Montagnais, Amikwa, and others — 
under Durantaye, DuLuth, and Tonti, to serve as an auxiliary force to about 
1,200 French and colonial levies, to be employed in attacking and destroying 
the Seneca. Having reached Irondequoit, the Seneca landing-place on L. 
Ontario, Denonville built there a stockade iu which he left a garrison of 440 
men. Thence advancing to attack the Seneca villages, he was ambushed by 600 
or SOO Seneca, who charged and drove back the colonial levies and their Indian 
allies, and threw the veteran regiments into disorder. Only by the overwhelm- 
ing numbers of his force was the traitorous Denonville saved from disastrous 
defeat. 

In 1763, at Bloody Run and the Devil's Hole, situated on Niagara r. about 4 
m. below the falls, the Seneca ambushed a British supply train on the portage 
road from Ft Schlosser to Ft Niagara, only three escaping from a force of 
nearly 100. At a short distance from this place the same Seneca ambushed a 
British force composed of two companies of troops who were hastening to the 
aid of the supply train, only eight of whom escaped massacre. These bloody 
and harsh measures were the direct result of the general unrest of the Six 
Nations and the western tribes, arising from the manner of the recent occu- 
pancy of the posts by the British, after the surrender of Canada by the French 



48 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. anv. 32 

on Seiit. 8, 1760. They contrasted the sympathetic and bountiful paternalism of 
the French regime with the neglect and niggardliness that characterized the 
British rule. Such was the state of affairs that on July 29, 17G1, Sir Wm. 
Johnson wrote to General Amherst : " I see plainly that there appears to be an 
universal jealousy amongst every nation, on account of the hasty steps they 
look upon we are taking towards getting possession of this country, which meas- 
ures, I am certain, will never subside whilst we encroach within the limits 
which you may recollect have been put under the protection of the King in the 
year 1726, and confirmed to them by him and his successors ever since and by 
the orders sent to the governors not to allow any one of his subjects settling 
thereon . . . but that it should remain their absolute proi^erty." But, by the 
beginning of the American Revolution, so well had the British agents reconciled 
them to the rule of Great Britain that the Seneca, together with a large ma- 
jority of the people of the Six Nations, notwithstanding their pledges to the con- 
trary, reluctantly espoused the cause of the British against the colonies. Con- 
sequently they suffered retribution for their folly when Gen. Sullivan, in 1779, 
after defeating their warriors, burned their villages and destroyed their crops. 

There is no historical evidence that the Seneca who were on the Ohio and the 
s. shore of L. Erie in the ISth and 10th centuries were chiefly an outlying colony 
from the Iroquois tribe of that name dwelling in New York. The significant 
fact that in historical times their afiiliations were never with the Iroquois, but 
rather with tribes usually hostile to them, is to be explained on the presump- 
tion that they were rather some remnant of a subjugated tribe dependent on 
the Seneca and dwelling on lands under the jurisdiction of their conquerors. It 
is a fair inference that they were largely subjugated Erie and Conestoga. 

The earliest estimates of the numbers of the Seneca,- in 1660 and 1677, give 
them about 5,000. Later estimates of the population are: 3,500 (1721) ; 1,750 
(1736); 5,000 (1765); 3,250 (1778); 2,000 (17S3) ; 3.000 (1783), and 1,780 
(1796). In 1825 those in New York were reported at 2.325. In 1850. according 
to Morgan, those in New York numbered 2.712, while about 210 more were on 
Grand River res. in Canada. In 1909 those in New Y'ork numbered 2.749 on the 
three reservations, which, with those on Grand r., Ontario, would give them 
a total of 2,962. The proportion of Seneca now among the 4,071 Iroquois at 
Caughnawaga, St Regis, and Lake of Two Mountains, Quebec, can not be esti- 
mated. 

Characterization of Contents 

The Seneca material embodied in the following pages consists of 
two parts. 

Part 1 comprises the matter recorded in the field by the late Jere- 
miah Curtin in 1883, 1886, and 1887 on the Cattaraugus reservation, 
near Versailles, New York, including tales, legends, and myths, sev- 
eral being translations of texts belonging to this collection made by 
the editor. This work of Mr. Curtin represents in part the results 
of the first serious attempt to record with satisfactory fullness the 
folklore of the Seneca. 

The material consists largely of narratives or tales of fiction — 
naive productions of the story-teller's art which can lay no claim 
to be called myths, although undoubtedly they contain many things 
that cliaracterize myths — narratives of the power and deeds of one 
or more of the personified active forces or powers immanent in and 



Hewitt] INTRODUCTION 49 

expressed by phenomena or processes of nature in human guise or in 
that of birds or beasts. They do not refer to the phenomena per- 
sonified as things unique, but as equaled or fully initiated by human 
personages made potent by orenda, or magic power, hence they 
describe a period long after the advent of man on earth, and in this 
respect do not exhibit the character of myths. 

Again, in some of the narratives the same incident or device ap- 
pears as common property ; that is to say, these several stories employ 
the same episode for the purpose of expansion and to glorify tlie hero 
as well as his prowess. An instance in point is that in which the hero 
himself, or otliers at his order, gathers the bones of the skeletons of 
other adventurous heroes like himself, who failed in the tests of 
orenda and so forfeited their lives to the challenger, and, hastily 
placing them in normal positions with respect to one another, quickens 
them by exclaiming, '" This tall hickory tree will fall on you, brothers, 
unless you arise at once," while pushing against the tree itself. 
Sometimes it is a tall pine that so figures in these accounts. Again, 
a pupil of a sorcerer or a noted witch is forbidden to go in a certain 
direction, while permission is given to go in any other direction. 
But at a certain time the budding hero or champion wizard goes 
surreptitiously in the forbidden direction, and at once there is colli- 
sion between his orenda, or magic power, and that of the well-known 
wizards and sorcerers dwelling in that quarter. This pupil is usually 
the only living agent for the preservation of the orenda of some noted 
family of wizards or witches. The hero, after performing certain 
set tasks, overcomes tlie enemies of his family and then brings to life 
those of his kindred who failed in the deadly strife of orendas. 

The identifications and interpretative field notes accompanying 
Mr. Curtin's material by some mischance were not made a part of 
the present collection. Their loss, which has added greatly to the 
work of the editor, is unfortunate, as Mr. Curtin possessed in so 
marked a degree the power of seizing readily the motive and signifi- 
cance of a story that his notes undoibtedly would have supplied 
material for the intelligent explanation and analysis of the products 
of the Indian mind contained in this memoir. 

The texts recorded in the Seneca dialect by Mr. Curtin were very 
difficult to read, as they had been recorded with a lead pencil 
and had been carried from place to place until they were for the 
greater .part almost illegible. The fact that these texts were the 
rough field notes of Mr. Curtin, unrevised and unedited, added to 
the difficulty of translating them. Fortunately, in editing a large 
portion of one of these manuscripts, the editor had the assistance of 
his niece, Miss Caroline G. C. Hewitt, who speaks fluently the Seneca 
dialect of the Iroquois languages. 
94615°— 18 4 



50 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 32 

Part 2 also consists of Seneca legends and myths, which are 
translations made expressly for this work from native texts recorded 
by Mr. Hewitt in the autumn of 1896. Two of the texts so trans- 
lated appear here, revised and edited, with a closely literal inter- 
linear translation in English. The matter of Part 2 constitutes 
about two-fifths of the whole, containing only 31 items, while there 
are 107 in Part 1; but the latter narratives are uniformly much 
longer than the former. 

The Seneca informants of Mr. Hewitt in the field were Mr. 
Truman Halftown, Mr. John Armstrong, and Chief Priest Henry 
Stevens, all of the Cattaraugus Reservation, N. Y. These worthy 
men, who have all passed away, were uniformly patient, kind, and 
interested. They were men whose faith in the religion of tiieir 
ancestors ennobled them with good will, manliness, and a desire to 
serve. 

Special attention is drawn to the freedom of these Seneca narra- 
tives from coarseness of thought and expression, although in some 
respectable quarters obscenity seems to be regarded as a dominant 
characteristic of American Indian myths and legendary lore. This 
view is palpably erroneous and unjust, because it is founded on faulty 
and inadequate material ; it is, moreover, governed largely by the 
personal equation. 

To form an impartial and correct judgment of the moral tone of 
the myths and legends of the American Indian, a distinction must be 
made between myths and legends on the one hand and tales and 
stories which are related primarily for the indecent coarseness of 
their thought and diction on the other; for herein lies the line of 
demarcation between narratives in which the rare casual references to 
indelicate matters are wholly a secondary consideration and not the 
motives of the stories, and those ribald tales in which the evident 
motive is merely to pander to depraved taste by detailing the coarse, 
the vulgar, and the filthy in life. 

It is, indeed, a most unfortunate circumstance in the present study 
of the spoken literature of the North American Indians that the head- 
long haste and nervous zeal to obtain bulk rather than quality in 
collecting and recording it ai'e imfavorable to the discovery and 
acquisition of the philosophic and the poetic legends and myths so 
sacred to these thoughtful people. The inevitable result of this 
method of research is the wholly erroneous view of the ethical char- 
acter of the myths and legends and stories of the American Indian, 
to which reference has already been made. The lamentable fact that 
large portions of some collections of so-called American Indian tales 
and narratives consist for the greater part of coarse, obscene, and 
indelicate recitals in no wise shows that the coarse and the indelicate 
were the primary motives in the sacred lore of the people, but it does 
indicate the need of clean-minded collectors of these narratives, men 



hewittJ introduction 52 

■who know that the obscene can not be the dominant theme of the 
legendary lore of anj' people. Such men will take the necessary time 
and trouble to become sufficiently acquainted witii the people whose 
literature they desire to record to gain the confidence and good will 
of tlie teachers and the wise men and women of the communitv' 
because these are the only persons capable of giving anything like a 
trustworthy recital of the legendary and the poetic narratives and the 
sacred lore of their people. 

Should one attempt to acquire standard specimens of the litera- 
ture of the white 'people of America by consulting corner loafers and 
their ilk, thereby obtaining a mass of coarse and obscene tales and 
stories wholly misrepresenting the living thought of the great mass 
of the white people of the country, the procedure would in no wise 
differ, seemingly, from the usual course pursued by those who claim 
to be collecting the literature of the American Indian people by con- 
sulting immature youth, agency interpreters, and other uninformed 
persons, rather than by gaining the confidence of and consulting the 
native priests and shamans and statesmen. 

To claim that in American Indian communities their story-tellers, 
owing to alleged Christian influence, are editing the mythic tales 
and legends of their people into a higher moral tone is specious and is 
a sop thrown to religious prejudice for the purpose of giving color 
to the defense of an erroneous view of the moral tone of such myths 
and legends. 

It is notorious that in this transition period of American Indian 
life the frontiersman and the trader on the borderland have not been 
in general of such moral character as to reflect the highest ideals in 
thought or action. Few genuine native legends and myths show 
any so-called " moral "' revision from contact with " white people." It 
is, of course, undeniable that the coarse, the rude, and the vulgar in 
word, thought, and deed are very real and ever-present elements in 
the life of every so-called Christian community; and they are present 
in every other community. But this fact does not at all argue that it 
is useful to collect and record in detail the narratives of these in- 
decent aspects of life in any community, because the whole.some, the 
instructive, and the poetic and beautiful are, forsooth, far more diffi- 
cult to obtain. 

Except in the case of novices in the work it may be stated that 
the moral tone or quality of the mythic and legendary material col- 
lected in any community is measurably an unconscious reflex of the 
mental and moral attitude of the collector toward the high ideals 
of the race. 

It is a pleasure to make reference here to the work of Mr. Frank 
Hamilton Cushing, Dr. Washington Matthews, and Mr. Jeremiah 
Curtin, who, in order to study with discrimination and sympathy the 



52 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ANN. 32 

spoken literature of the American Indians, took the necessary trouble 
to learn the motif of the narratives of mythic and legendary origin 
of these people; hence they did not feel it incumbent upon them to 
apologize for the moral tone of the legends and myths they recorded 
and published, for their own mental attitude toward the wholesome, 
the worthy, and the noble was such as to enable them to discover and 
to appreciate the same qualities in the thinking of the people they 
studied. To expound like the priest, to speak like the prophet, and 
to think like the myth-maker, were among the gifts of these men 
which enabled them to understand the motives underlying the myths 
and legends of the tribal men of the world, while they were at the 
same time fully alive to the scientific use and value of these same 
poetic narratives when analyzed and interpreted sympathetically. 

Mr. Curtin obtained his Seneca material from the following per- 
sons of the Seneca tribe, many of whom have since died: Abraham 
Johnny-John, Solomon O'Bail, George Titus, John Armstrong, 
Zachariah Jimeson, Andrew Fox, Henry Jacob, Henry Silverheels, 
Peter White, Black Chief, and Phoebe Logan. He recorded an 
extensive vocabulary of the Seneca, with which he had become 
familiar by intensive study of its structure. 

Mr. Curtin, with the mind of a master, fully grasped the impor- 
tance and the paramount significance of the intelligent collection, 
and the deeper sympathetic study, of legends and myths in general, 
and of those of the American Indians in particular, in the final estab- 
lishment of the science of mythology. 

To the editor it is one of the delightful memories of his early offi- 
cial life to recall the many instructive hours spent with Mr. Curtin 
in discussing the larger significance and the deeper implications 
which are found in the intelligent study and interpretation of legends, 
epics, and myths — the highest type of poetic and creative composi- 
tion. And for this reason he has so freely cited from the writings 
of Mr. Curtin the meaning and the value which such a study and 
analysis had for Mr. Curtin and has for those who like him will 
fully appreciate that " the Indian tales reveal to us a whole system 
of religion, philosophy, and social polity. . . . the whole mental 
and social life of the race to which they belong is evident in them." 

The following quotations give all too briefly, perhaps, his philo- 
sophic views on these questions in his own deft, inimitable way. It is 
believed that these citations will enable the reader and the student to 
gain some clear idea of the pregnant lessons Mr. Curtin drew from 
the analysis and interpretation of the legends and myths which he 
recorded, as well as of his method of studying and expounding them. 
The Seneca collection herewith presented forms only a small portion 
of his recorded mythic material. 

A few tens of years ago it was all-important to understand and expl.oln tlje 
brotherhood and blood-bond of Aryan nations, and their relation to the Semitic 



hewitc] intkoduction 53 

race; to discover and set forth tlie meaning of tliat wliich in mental work, 
historic strivings, and spiritual ideals ties the historic nations to one another. 
At the present time this worli is done, if not completely, at least measurably 
well, and a new work awaits us, to demonstrate that there is a higher and 
a mightier bond, the relationship of created things with one another, and their 
inseverable connection with That which some men reverence as God, but which 
other men call the Unknowable, the Unseen. 

This new work, which is the necessary continuation of the first, and which 
alone can give it completeness and significance, will be achieved when we have 
established the science of mythologj'.' 

Again, he asks : " How is this science from which men may receive 
such service to be founded?" 

On this point Mr. Curtin is clear and instructive, maintaining that 
such a science of mythology can be founded — 

In one way alone: by obtaining from races outside of the Aryan and Semitic 
their myths, tbeir beliefs, their view of the world ; this done, the rest will follow 
as a result of intelligent labor. But the great battle is in the first part of the 
work, for the inherent difficulty of the task has been increased by Europeans, 
who have exterminated great numbers among the best primitive races, partially 
civilized or rather degraded others, and rendered the remainder distrustful and 
not easily approached on the subject of their myths and ethnic beliefs. 

Its weightiest service will be rendered in the domain of religion, for without 
mythology there can be no thorough understanding of any religion on earth, 
either in its inception or its growth.' 

The next citation shows Mr. Curtin's complete mastery of the 
subject in hand, and his conclusions are well worth the careful con- 
sideration of every student of mythic and legendary lore. In refer- 
ence to the collection of myths and tales and beliefs he presents the 
following wise conclusions: 

There is everywhere a sort of selvage of short tales and anecdotes, small 
information about ghosts and snakes, among all these races, which are easily 
obtained, and most Europeans .seem to think that when they have collected some 
of these trivial things they have all that the given people possess. But they are 
greatly mistaken. All these people have something hotter. There was not a 
single stock of Indians in America which did not posse.ss, in beautiful forms, the 
elements of an extensive literature with a religion and philosophy which would 
have thrown light on many beginnings of Aryan and Semitic thought, a 
knowledge of which in so many cases is now lost to us, but which we hope to 
recover in time ... if civilized men instead of slaying ".savages." directly 
and indirectly, will treat them as human beings, and not add to the labor of those 
workers who in the near future will surely endeavor, singly or in small groups, 
to study the chief primitive races of the earth and win from them, not short 
insignificant odds and ends of Information but great masses of material; 

. . these races possess in large volume some of the most beautiful produc- 
tions of the human mind, and facts that are not merely of great, but of unique, 
value.' 

> Curtin. Jerptniali, Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars, 
p. vii. Boston, 1890. 
= Ibid., p %. 
• Ibid., pp. x-xl. 



54 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [bth. ann. 8« 

But we have no tale in which it is clear who all the characters are; the 
modifying influences were too great and long-continued to permit that. Though 
nijth-tales are, perhaps, more interesting ... in their present form, they 
will have not their full interest for science till it is shown who most of the 
actors are under their disguises. 

This is the nearest task of mythology. 

There are masterpieces in literature filled with myths, inspired with myth 
conceptions of many kinds, simply colored by the life of the time and the 
nations among which these masterpieces were written and moulded to shape 
by artists, made strong from the spirit of great, simple people, as uQknown to 
us as the nameless' heroes who perished before Agamemnon. How much 
mythology is there in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the .Eneid, in the Divine 
Comedy of Dante, in the works of the other three great Italian poets? How 
much in Paradise Lost? How could "King Lear" and "Midsummer Night's 
Dream," or the " Idylls of the King," have been written without Keltic mythol- 
ogy? Many of these literary masterpieces have not merely myths in their com- 
position as a sentence has words, but the earlier ones are enlarged or modified 
myth-tales of those periods, while the later ones are largely modeled on and 
inspired by the earlier.' 

Again he declares : 

It should be remembered that whatever be the names of the myth-tale heroes 
at present, the original heroes were not human. They were not men and 
women, though in most cases the present heroes or heroines bear the names 
of men and women, or children ; they perform deeds which no man could per- 
form, which only one of the forces of Nature could perform, if it had the 
volition and desires of a person. This is the great cause of wonderful deeds in 
myth-tales.' 

With reference to the work already done in American Indian 
mythology, Mr. Curtin remarks : 

We have now in North America a number of groups of tales obtained from 
the Indians which, when considered together, illustrate and supplement one 
another; they constitute, in fact, a whole system. These tales we may describe as 
forming eollectively the creation myth of the New World. . . . In some eases, 
simple and transparent, it is not difficult to recognize the heroes; they are 
distinguishable at once either by their names or their actions or both. In other 
cases these tales are more involved, and the heroes are not so easily known, 
because they are concealed by names and epithets. Taken as a whole, however, 
the Indian tales are remarkably clear.' 

As to the content of these American Indian tales and legends, Mn 
Curtin says ; 

What is the substance and sense of these Indian tales, of what do they treat? 
To begin with, they give an account of how the present order of things arose In 
the world, and are taken up with the exploits, adventures, and struggles of 
various elements, animals, birds, reptiles, iu.sects, plants, rocks, and other 
objects before they became what they are. . . . According to the earliest 
tales of North America, this world was occupied, prior to the appearance of 
man, by beings called variously " the first people," " the outside people," or 
simply " people," — the same term in all eases being used for people that Is 
applied to Indians at present. 

• Curtin, Jeremiah, Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars, 
p. Ix, Boston, 1890. 

- Ibid., p. xvii. 

• Curtin. Jeremiah. Hero-Tales of Ireland, pp. ix, x Boston, 1894. 



I 



HEwS] INTRODUCTION 55 

These people, who were very numerous, lived togetlier for ages in harmony. 
There were no collisions among them, no disputes during that period; all were 
in perfect accord. In some mysterious fashion, however, each individual was 
changing imperceptibly; an internal movement was going on. At last a time 
came when the differences were sufficient to cause conflict, except in the case 
of a group to be mentioned hereafter, and struggles began. The.se struggles 
were gigantic, for the "first people" had mighty power; they had also won- 
derful iierception and knowledge. They felt the approach of friends or enemies 
even at a distance: they knew the thought in another's heart. If one of them 
e.xpressed a wish, it was accomplished immediately; nay. if he even thought of 
a thing, it was there before him. Endowed with such powers and qualities, it 
would seem that their struggles would be endless and Indecisive; but such was 
not the case. Though opponents might be equally dextrous, and have the power 
0-" the wish or the word in a similar degree, one of them would conquer in the 
end through wishing for more effective and better thing.s, and thus become the 
hero of a higher cau.se; that is, a cause from which benefit would accrue to 
mankind, the coming race.' 

. . . Among living creatures, we are not to reckon man, for man does not 
appear in any of those myth tales ; tliey relate solely to extra-human exist- 
ences, and describe the battle and agony of creation, not the adventures of 
anything in the world since it received its present form and office. According 
to popular modes of thought and speech, all this would be termed the fall of 
the god.s. for the " first people "' of the Indian tales correspond to the earliest 
gods of other races.' 

In the theory of spiritual evolution, worked out by the aboriginal mind of 
America, all kinds of moral quality and character are represented as coming 
from an internal movement through which the latent, unevolved personality of 
each individual of these " first people," or gods, is produced. Once that per- 
sonality is produced, every species of dramatic situation and tragic catastrophe 
follows as an inevitable sequence. There is no more peace after that; there 
are only collisions followed by combats which are continued by the gods till 
they are turned into all the things, animal, vegetable, and mineral — which are 
either useful or harmful to man, and thus creation is accomplished. During 
the period of struggles, the gods organize institutions, social and religious, ac- 
cording to which they live. These are bequeatlied to man ; and nothing that an 
Indian has is of human invention, all is divine. An avowed innovation, any- 
thing that we call reform, anything invented by man. would be looked on as 
sacrilege, a terrible, an inexpiable crime. The Indian lives in a world prepared 
by the gods, and follows in their footsteps — that is the only morality, the one 
pure and holy religion.' 

This creation myth of the New World is a work of great value, for by aid of 
it we can bring order into mythology, and reconstruct, at least in outline, and 
provisionally, that early system of belief which was common to all races: a 
system which, though expressed in many languages and in endlessly varying 
details, has one meaning, and was. in the fullest sense of the word, one — a 
religion truly catholic and oecumenical, for it was believed in by all people, 
wherever resident, and believed in with a vividness of faith; and a sincerity of 
attachment, which no civilized man can even imagine, unle.ss he has had long 
experience of primitive races.* 

» Curtin, Jeremiah, Hero-Tales of Ireland, pp. x, xl, Boston, 1894. 

' Ihid.. p. xl. 

» Ibid., pp. xli, xill. 

• Ibid., p. xUi. 



56 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 32 

The war between the gods continued till it produced on land, in the water, 
and the air, all creatures that move, and all plants that grow. There is not a 
beast, bird, flsh, reptile, insect, or plant which is not a fallen divinity ; and for 
every one noted there is a story of its previous existence. 

This transformation of the former people, or divinities, of America was 
finished just before the present race of men — that is, the Indians — appeared.' 

In some mythologies a few personages who are left unchanged at tlie eve of 
man's coming transform themselves voluntarily. The details of the change vary 
from tribe to tribe, but in all it takes place in some described way, and forms 
part of the general change, or metamorphosis, which is the vital element in the 
American system. , In many, perhaps in all, the mythologies, there is an account 
of how some of the former people, or gods, instead of fighting and taking part 
in the struggle of creation and being transformed, retained their original char- 
acter, and either went above the sky or sailed away westward to where the 
.sky comes down, and pa.ssed out under It, and beyond, to a plea.sant region where 
they live in delight. This is that contingent to which I have referred, that part 
of the "first people" in which no passion was developed; they remained in 
primitive simplicity, undifferentiated, and are happy at present. They corre- 
spond to those gods of classic antiquity who enjoyed themselves apart, and took 
no interest whatever in the sufferings or the joys of mankind.' 

Everything in nature had a tale of its own, if some one would but tell it. 
and during the epoch of constructive power in the race, — the epoch when lan- 
guages were built up and great stories made, — few things of importance to 
people of that time were left unconsidered; hence there was among the Indians 
of America a volume of tales as immense, one might say, as an ocean river. 
This statement I make in view of materials which I have gathered myself, and 
which are still unpublished, — materials which, though voluminous, are com- 
paratively meager, merely a hint of what in some tribes was lost, and of what 
in others is still uncollected. . . . 

From what is known of the mind of antiquity, and from what data we have 
touching savage life in the present, we may affirm as a theory that primitive 
beliefs in all places are of the same system essentially as the American. In 
that system, every individual existence beyond man is a divinity, but a divinity 
under sentence, — a divinity weighed down by fate, a divinity with a history 
behind it, a history which is tragedy or comedy as the case may be. These 
histories extend along the whole line of experience, and include every combiua 
tion conceivable to primitive man.' 

During eight years of investigation among Indian tribes in North America, 
I obtained the various parts of that Creation myth mentioned in this intro- 
duction, from tribes that were remote from one another, and in different 
degress of development. Such tales I found in the east, in the central regions, 
and finally in California and Oregon. Over this space, the extreme points of 
which are 3,000 miles apart, each tribe has the Creation myth, — one portion 
being brought out with special emphasis in one tribe, and another por- 
tion in a different one. In tribes least developed, the earliest tales are very 
distinct, and specially valuable on some points relating to the origin and fall 
of the gods. Materials from the extreme west are more archaic and simple 
than those of the east. In fact the two regions present the two extremes, 
in North America, of least developed and most developed aboriginal thought. 
In this is their interest. They form one complete system.' 

1 Curtin, Jeremiab, Uero-Talcs of Ireland, p. xiv, Boston, 1894. 
•Ibid., p. XT. 
•Ibid., p. xvi. 
♦Ibid., pp. xlix-L 



^"'/J,'.^] INTEODUCTION 57 

To sum up, we may say, that the Indian tales reveal to us a whole system of 
religion, philosophy, and social polity. . . . 

Those tales form a complete series. The whole mental and social life of the 
race to which they belong is evident in them.' 

The results to be obtained from a comparison of systems of thought like the 
Indian and the Gaelic would be great, if made thoroughly. If extended to all 
races, such a comparison would render possible a history of the human mind 
in a form sucli as few men at present even dream of,— a history with a basis as 
firm as that which lies under geology. ... We must make large additions 
indeed to our knowledge of primitive peoples. We must complete the work 
begun in America. . . . The undertaking is arduous, and there is need to 
engage in it promptly. The forces of civilized society, at present, are de.stroying 
on all sides, not saving that which is precious in primitive people. Civilized 
society supposes that man, in an early degree of development, should be stripped 
of all that he owns, both material and mental, and then be refashioned to 
serve the society that stripped him. If he will not yield to the stripping and 
training, then slay him.' 

In the United States, little was accomplished till recent years: of late, how- 
ever, public interest has been roused somewliat, and, since Major Powell entered 
the field, and became Director of the Bureau of Ethnology, more has been done 
in studying the native races of America than had been done from the discovery 
of the country up to that time.' 

Of course there is no true information in the American ethnic religion as to 
the real changes which affected the world around us; but there is in it, as in 
all systems like it. true information regarding the history of the human mind. 
Every ethnic religion gives us documentary evidence. It gives us positive facts 
which, in their own sphere, are as true as are facts of geology in the history 
of the earth's crust and surface. They do not tell us what took place in the 
world without, in the physical universe, they had no means of doing so; but 
they do tell us what took place at certain periods in the world of mind, in the 
interior of man." 

An ethnic or primitive religion is one which belongs to people of one blood 
and language, people who increased and developed together with the beliefs 
of every sort which belong to them. Such a religion includes every species of 
knowledge, every kind of custom, institution, and art. Every aboriginal nation 
or human brood has its gods. All people of one blood and origin are under the 
immediate care and supervision of their gods, and preserve continual communi- 
cation and converse with them. According to their own beliefs, such people 
received from their gods all that they have, all that they practice, all that they 
know. Such people, while their blood is unmixed and their society unconquered, 
adhere to their gods with the utmost fidelity. 

The bonds which connect a nation with its gods, bonds of faith, and those 
which connect the individuals of that nation with one another, bonds of blood, 
are the strongest known to primitive man, and are the only social bonds in 
prehistoric ages.* 

A good deal has been given to the world of late on mythology by able writers 
who with good materials would attain good results; but as the materials at 
their disposal are faulty, nuich of their work with all its cleverness is mainly a 
persistent pouring of the empty into the void. 



» Curtin, Jeremiah, Hero-Tales of Ireland, p. xlviii, Boston, 1894 
= Ibid., pp. xlvi, 
« Curtin. Jeremi 
* Iliid.. p. xxxii, 



- Ibid., pp. xlvi, xlvll. 

•Curtin. Jeremiah, Creation Myths of Primitive America, pp. xxxi-xxxil, Boslon. 1898. 



58 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [etb!. ann. 32 

We have seen attempts made to show that real gods have been developed by 
savage men from their own dead savage chiefs. Such a thing has never been 
done since the human race began, and it could never have been Imagined by any 
man who knew the ideas of primitive races from actual experience or from com- 
petent testimony. The most striking thing in all savage belief is the low esti- 
mate put on man when unaided by divine, uncreated power. In Indian belief 
every object in the universe is divine except man.' . . . 

Vegetable gods, so called, have been scoffed at by writers on mythology. The 
scoff is baseless, for the first people were turned, or turned themselves, into 
trees and various plants as frequently as into beasts and other creatures. Maize 
or Indian corn is a transformed god who gave himself to be eaten to save man 
from hunger and death. When Spanish priests saw little cakes of meal eaten 
ceremonially by Indians, and when the latter informed them that they were 
eating their god, the good priests thought this a diabolical mockery of the 
Holy Sacrament, and a blasphemous trick of Satan to ruin poor ignorant 
Indians. 

I have a myth in which the main character is a violent and cruel old person- 
age who is merciless and faith-breaking, who does no end of damage till he is 
cornered at last by a good hero and turned into the wild parsnip. Before 
transformation this oid parsnip could travel .swiftly, but now he must stay in 
one place, and of course kills people only when thoy eat him. 

The treasure saved to science by the primitive race of America is unique in 
value and high significance. The first result from it is to carry us back through 
untold centuries to that epoch when man made the earliest collective and con- 
sistent explanation of this universe and its origin. 

Occupying this vantage-ground, we can now throw a flood of light on all those 
mythologies and ethnic religions or systems of thought from which are lost in 
part, great or shiall, the materials needed to prove the foundation and begin- 
nings of each of them. In this condition are all ancient recorded religions, 
whether of Greece. Rome, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, or India." 

Again, in speaking of the first people, the ancients, or the man- 
heinr/s of the oldest myth, or rather cycle of myths, in America, Mr. 
Curtin continues his exposition of the significance of these poetic 
figures : 

After they had lived on an Indefinite period, they appear as a vast number 
of groups, which form two camps, which may be called the good and the bad. 
In the good camp are the persons who originate all the different kinds of 
food, establish all institutions, arts, games, amusements, dances, and religious 
ceremonies for the coming race. 

In the other camp are cunning, deceitful beings, ferocious and hungry man- 
eaters — the harmful powers of every description. The heroes of the good 
camp overcome these one after another by stratagem, superior skill, swiftness, 
or the use of the all-powerful wish; but the.v are immortal, and, though over- 
come, can not be destroyed. . . . 

When the present race of men (that i.s, Indians) appear on the scene, the 
people of the previous order of affairs have vanished. One division, vast in 
number, a part of the good and all the bad ones, have become the beasts, birds, 
fishes, reptiles, insects, plants, stones, cold, heat, light, darkness, fire, rain, 
snow, earthquake, sun, moon, stars — have become, in fact, every living thing, 
object, agency, phenomenon, process, and power outside of man. Another 

• Curtin, Jeremiah, Creation Myths of Primitive America, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii, Boston. 
1S98. 

- Ibid., pp. xxxviii-xxxix. 



HE 



'Ew'iTi] INTKODUCTION 59 



party much smaller in number, who succeeded in avoiding entanglement in the 
struggle of preparing the world for man, left tlie earth. According to some 
myths they went beyond the sky to the upper land ; according to others they 
sailed in boats over the ocean to the West — sailed till they went out beyond the 
setting sun, beyond the line where the sky touches the earth. There they are 
living now free from pain, disease, and death, which came into the world just 
before they left, but before the coming of man and through the agency of this 
first people. . . . 

This earliest American myth cycle really describes a period in the beginning 
of which all things — and there was no thing then which was not a person — 
lived in company without danger to each other or trouble. This was the period 
of prinifeval innocence, of which we hear so many echoes in tradition and 
early literature, when that intinite variety of character and quality now 
manifest in the universe was still dormant and hidden, practically uncre- 
ated. This was the " golden age " of so many mythologies — the " golden age "' 
dreamed of so often, but never seen by mortal man ; a period when, in their 
original form and power, the panther and the deer, the wolf and the antelope, 
lay down together, when the rattlesnake was as harmless as the rabbit, when 
trees could talk and flowers sing, when both could move as nimbly as the 
swiftest on earth. 

Such, in a sketch exceedingly meager and imperfect, a hint rather than a 
sketch, is the first great cycle of American mythology — the creation-myth of 
the New World. From this cycle are borrowed the characters and machinery 
for myths of later construction and stories of inferior importance ; myths 
relating to the action of all observed forces and phenomena ; struggles of the 
seasons, winds, light and darkness; and stories in great numbers containing 
adventures without end of the present animals, birds, reptiles, and insects — 
people of the former worhl in their fallen state. ... 

To whatever race they may belong, the earliest myths, whether of ancient 
record or recent collection, point with unerring indication to the same source 
as those of America, for the one reason that there is no other source. The 
personages of any given body of myths are such manifestations of force in the 
world around them, or the result of such manifestations, as the ancient myth- 
makers observed ; and whether they went backwards or forwards, these were 
the only personages possible to them, because they were the only personages 
accessible to their senses or conceivable to their minds. . . . 

Since they had passions varying like those of men, the myth-makers narrate 
the origin of these passions, and carried their personages back to a period of 
peaceful and innocent chaos, when there was no motive as yet in existence. 
After a while the shock came. The motive appeared in the form of revenge 
for acts done through cupidity or ignorance ; strife began, and never left the 
world of the gods till one quota of them was turned into animals, plants, 
heavenly bodies, everything in the universe, and the other went away unchanged 
to a place of happy enjoyment. 

All myths have the same origin, and all run parallel up to a certain point, 
which may be taken as the point to which the least-developed people have 
risen.' 

And Mr. Curtin further says : 

At that period the earth . . . was occupied by personages who are called 
people, though it is well understood at all times that they were not human ; 
they were persons, individuals.'' 



' Curtin, Jeremiah Myths and Folk-Lore of Irelaad, pp. 22-27, Boston, 1890. 
«!bid.. p. 22. 



60 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 32 

To trace the ancestral sources of a people's thought and character, 
a careful and critical study of the myths, and later of the mythology 
of that people, first exclusively and thfen comparatively, is required. 
This study deals with ideas and concepts expressed by three well- 
known Greek terms, mythos, epos, and logos, and also with those 
expressed by the term resulting from the combination of the first 
and the last of these words. These are among many words of human 
speech which comprise all human experience and history. It is re- 
markable also that each may be translated into English by the term 
" word." 

The word " mythology " is a philosophic term composed of two 
very interesting and instructive Greek words, mythos and logos. 

The first 'term, mythos, denoted whatever was thoughtfully ut- 
tered by the mouth of savage and barbaric men — the expression of 
thought which had been shut in to mature — a story of prehistoric 
time, a naive, creatiye concept staged in terms of human life and 
activity — a poem. In matters of religion and cosmogony such an 
utterance was final and conclusive to those men. 

The second term, logos, having at the beginning approximately 
the same meaning as mythos, became in Greek philosophic think- 
ing the symbol or expression of the internal constitution as well a? 
the external form and sign of thought, and so became "the expres- 
sion of exact thought — . . . exact because it corresponds to uni- 
versal and unchanging principles," reaching " its highest exalta- 
tion in becoming not only reason in man but the reason in the uni- 
verse — the Divine Logos, the thought of God, the Son of God, God 
himself " (Curtin). The logos is thus the expression i)f the philoso- 
phy of men measurably cultured ; it is the intelligent exegesis of the 
content of the mythos in terms of objective and subjective reality; 
it is scientific because it is logical; it is the later literary criticism — 
the analytic and synthetic treatment of myths and epics. So, in the 
exjierience of every people having an ethnic past, mythos and logos 
represent two well-defined stages of human thought — the naive and 
the philosophic — and also the elder time and the modern. So myth- 
ology may be defined as the science or the logic of the myth; it 
belongs to times of relatively high culture and does not flourish in 
savagery, for savnges have only myths. It may be well to note 
that a third stage of thought is expressed in the Greek term epos, 
which, is the adornment or garbing and dramatizing of the mj'th 
concepts in poetic form, in story, saga, and legend — the epic. 

Only modern research with its critical exegesis and sympathetic 
interpretation brings down the study of the concepts of the myths 
of the fathers measurably to the character of a science. 

The highest type of poetry expresses itself in uiyth, in the 
epos, and in the logos. For men of undeveloped thought, of inchoate 



CDRTIN 
HEWITT 



] INTRODUCTION 61 



mentation, this is the mental process through which they dimly 
apprehend the significance of the complex and closely interrelated 
phenomena of life and of environing nature, and the medium by 
which they harmonize the ceaseless functioning of these with their 
own experience, with the activity of their own subconscious mind, and 
^yith tlie divine pi'cmptings and visions vouchsafed them by the 
dawn of their own superconscious intellect. 

The initial step of the process is the ingenuous act of the imagina- 
tion in personifying, yea, in ideally humanizing, the bodies, elements, 
and foi-ces of environing nature; as, for instance, the picturing by the 
Iroquois and their neighbors, the Algonquian, of snow as the living 
body of a man formed by the God of Winter, whose breath was potent 
enough to drive animals and birds into their winter retreats and some 
even into hibernation^ represented as the hiding of tjie animals from 
his brother, the Master or God of Life. 

The next step in the process is the socialization of this vast com- 
pany — the imputation of life, soul, 25urpose, and a rational role to 
them constitutes the epic, which is also the poet's handiwork. 

As the basis of religious expression, Seneca-Iroquoian myths and 
legends, in common with those of all other men, are to most people 
the empty tales of superstition, the foundations of idolati-y, be- 
cause its gods and deities, forsooth, have never actually existed. 
But myths are fictitious only in form and dress, while they are true 
in matter and spirit, for truth is congruity between reason and 
objects, and hence is eternal and univei-sal. 

The human side of these personifications of the processes and 
phenomena of nature in some instances has become so real and so 
natural that these beings no longer act or function in terms of the 
processes of nature only, but as the thaumaturgic fetishes of potent 
sorcerers, performing wonderful feats of orenda, as they are repre- 
sented as doing in a large number of these narratives. Now, these 
accounts are certainly not myths and are not legends in the true sense 
of the term, but are, rather, fictitious narratives or tales of reputed 
individual human achievement, quite incredible, of course, as authen- 
tic acts of mankind. They center about the reputed affairs of a 
himaan being, or do so at least in the view of the modern story-teller. 

In the collection of Seneca narratives of Mr. Curtin eight relate 
to the Genonsgwa (the Stone Coats or Stone Giants), six to Hi"no"' 
(Hinon) or the Thunder People, six to the Dagwanoenyent or 
Whirlwind People, five to the Shagodiioweq or AA'ind People, and 
three to the Djogeon or Dwarf People. It is probable that the two 
groups of " wind " peoples originally arose from a single personage. 
From single personages like Hi"no''' or Thunder, Shagodiioweq o'r 
the Wind, and Dagwanoenyent or the Cyclone or Whirlwind, the 



62 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 32 

story-tellers of to-day have created large bodies of fictitious people, 
representing a reversal of the original process by which the first 
great concepts were formed. 

But truth seemingly was not readily appreciable by primal men 
until it was dramatized in saga, in legend, and in myth, in formulas, 
rites, ceremonies, customs, and material symbols based on those naf- 
I'atives; in short, it had to be couched in terms of human expression 
and activity. These symbols and figurative expressions bore the 
fashion and impress of the time and the place, and so before truth so 
dramatized can be fully understood it must be carefully freed from 
the garb and trappings of local and temporal use and need; in brief, 
the literi'l unreality of myth must be lifted fi"om the substantive and 
the spiritual realities it symbolizes. 

And, for this reason, a deity embodying or representing one of 
the great recurrent processes of nature or one of the seemingly 
changeless features of the universe is something vastly more than 
a mei'e figment of the human brain ; for, although conceived in terms 
of man, the " deity " in his own sphere and function is limitless in 
power, incomprehensible in mode of life and action, and abides with- 
out beginning of days or end of years — properties which make the 
god divine and infinitely superior to man, the creature of divine 
power. 

One of the fundamental teachings of the study of the myths of 
the American Indians is that the so-called Genesis or Creation myths 
relate the activities and exploits, in more or less detail, of the '' elder 
people," the " first people," whom men later call the gods. Rightly 
understood and sympathetically conceived, these events are not predi- 
cated of human beings as such. These narrations explain in just 
what manner the present order of things in nature arose; they 
detail what took place in a condition of things different from the 
present, and which were, in the minds of their relators, the neces- 
sary antecedent processes resulting in the establishment of the pres- 
ent order of nature. They treat only of the " first people." None 
relate to human beings and none treat of things done since man 
appeared on earth. 

Human in form and in feeling, and yet most divine, were the gods 
and deities of the ancient Seneca and the other Iroquoian peoples. 
While the divine social and political organization was necessarily for 
psychological reasons a close reflex or replica of the human, and 
although both gods and man derived descent from an original first 
parent, yet the first divine ancestor was a self-existing god, and the 
first man was the creature of one of these divine Powers. 

The expression of the mythic — the cosmogonic, the cosmologic — in 
terms of human function and attribute and activity is well illus- 
trated in the legends and myths of the Iroquoian peoples. In these 



CURT 
HEW 



j'^^] INTRODUCTION 63 



sagas the personifications of the elements and forces of nature are 
classified as human by the use of the term oii'gwe, " a human 
being or mankind" (for the word has both a singular and a plural 
signification), to designate them. 

The task of classifying these narratives, even tentatively, is not an 
easy one, for the proportion of these stories which seem to be unques- 
tionably fiction to those which are myths Siud legends is relatively 
much larger than might be suspected without some investigation. It 
is clearly wi-ong to call everything legend or myth when the evidence 
from the facts seems to forbid such action. For it is evident that 
very many of the narratives ar^ fiction — stories composed and related 
to amuse, to mystify, or to glorify some hero, or perhaps to spread 
tiie fame of some noted sorcerer and his fetishes. 

The setting and the framework of the narrative or story may be 
laken from a myth and one or more myth episodes incorporated in it, 
but the result is a fabrication because it does not rest on facts of 
human experience. 

Now, for example, the narratives concerning the so-called Stone 
Coats, Stone Giants, or the Genonsgwa are not myths but legends. 
These beings do not figure in the Creation Myth of the Iroquois, but 
are a brood of beings whose connection with Stone is due to false 
etymology of a proper name in a myth.^ This is an interesting and 
instructive example of forgotten derivations of words and names 
.'ind the resultant new conceptions. 

In the Genesis myth of the Iroquoian peoples the Winter Season 
by personification, was placed in the class of man-beings with the 
name, " He-who-is-clad-in-ice," or " He-who-is-ice-clad." Now it so 
happens that the word for ice and for chert or flint stone is derived 
from a common stem whose fundamental meaning is "glare," "crys- 
tal," or " what is ice-like." But the myth-tellers, in order to add an 
air of the mystical to their recital, did not fail to play on the doul)le 
meaning of the word for ice, and so represented the Winter Man- 
being as " The Flint-clad Man-being " rather than as " The Ice-clad 
Man-being." And the results of Winter's cold and frost were told in 
terms of flint or chert stone, and so bergs end cakes and blocks of 
ice became in the narration objects of flint and chert stone. Winter's 
cold is conveyed from place to place by means of cakes and bergs 
of ice, which are transformed by the poet into canoes of flint or stone. 
And in time the stone canoe is transferred from myth to the realm of 
fiction and legend to glorify the fame of some human hero. 

And in the thinking of the Iroquois the Flint-clad Man-being 
became separated and distinct from the Man-being of the Winter. 

1 For an px'pndpd otymolojrii' cienionstr.'ition of tho facts slated in tl>p text, consult 
articles Tawiskaron and Nanabonho by the editor in the Handbook of American Indians 
{Bulletin SO of the Bureau of American Hthnoluyy). 



64 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth ann. 32 

At this point the fictitious Man-being who was Stone-clad parted 
company forever with the personified nature force or process that 
was frost-bearing and ice-clad. The former was gradually reduced 
to a peculiar species of mankind — the stone giant, for he was repre- 
sented as stone-clad, while the latter retained his first estate as one 
of the chief characters in the Genesis myth of the Iroquoian peoples. 

The ordinary Iroquoian concept of the Stone Coat or Stone Giant 
indicates, to the student at least, that the Winter God, the Great 
Frost Giant of the common Iroquoian Genesis myth, was its source. 
Aside from the evident etymologic connection, the most significant 
feature is the constant tradition that the home land of these anthro- 
poid monsters is in the regions of the north where this same authority 
usually places the burial place of the Winter God after his defeat and 
death at the hands of his twin brother, the Life God, sometimes 
called the Master of Life. 

The tales which relate how the Stone Coat people are made from 
perverse men and women first by carefully covering the body with 
pitch and then by i oiling and wallowing in sand and down sand 
banks repeatedly, shows how utterly forgotten is the true source of 
this interesting concept among the story tellers and their hearers. 
There is no doubt that the original " Stone Coat " was the " Ice-Clad 
Winter God." In the Ciirtin collection there are eight stories which 
refer to the Genonsgwa, or Stone Coats, sometimes called Stone 
Giants, but there is nothing in them to connect these peculiar ficti- 
tious monsters with the original conception. In none are the opera- 
tions of the winter process predicated of these fictitious beings. They 
are merely exaggerated human figures and not symbols of a process 
of nature ^ their deeds are the deeds of men, and are not the acts of 
a process of nature expressed in terms of human activity. 

And thus is founded the race of the Stone Giants or Stone Coats, or 
more popularly the Giants. When once these fictitious beings were 
regarded as human monsters they soon became confused with cruel 
hermits and bloodthirsty sorcerers who because of evil tastes 
were cannibals and dwelt apart from the habitations of men, who 
shunned and feared them, and the tales about them became narra- 
tives that do not detail the activities of the Winter God — the personi- 
fied process of nature; and so, like their human prototypes, they 
increased and multiplied mightily, and so were as numerous as the 
leaves on the trees. 

The persons or figures produced by the attribution of human life 
and mind to all objective and subjective things were, by virtue of the 
reality of the elements they embodied, the deities or the gods of this 
system of thought. In brief, they were composed of both the meta- 
morphosed and of the unchanged first or ancient people who in dis- 
tinctive character were conceived of as the formal and outward ex- 



ZTi^] INTEODUCTION 65 

pression of human mind. In the course of time these deities or gods 
are said to have taught their people the arts and crafts and the ele- 
ments of their culture and their faith, thus revealing their will and 
the things which were to be in the future. This divine knowledge, 
this wisdom of the gods, was obtained or revealed in dreams or 
visions and by theophanies. But a knowledge of the activities of the 
people holding these views makes it evident that the doctrines and 
the arts and the crafts taught by the gods and the institutions 
founded by them for the people are in fact the activities of the 
people themselves which had been unconsciously imputed to these 
deities. Of course, the gods can teach and can reveal only what has 
been before imputed to them by the people. 

The original and chief person in the myth was not a human being, 
although he was represented as possessed of the form, the desires, 
and the volition of a person. He is reputed to have performed acts 
which no human being had the power to pei'form, acts which only 
the functioning of a process of nature or of life could accomplish. 

In some of these narratives human beings, bearing human names, 
have been substituted and the heroes and heroines of these stories are 
men, women, and children. 

The substitution of human beings in the stead of the personified 
forces or processes of nature supplies the reason that apparently 
wonderful superhuman deeds are accomplished by the human substi- 
tutes, whereas the acts portrayed are those of natural forces, not of 
human brain and brawn. 

The stories of the Dagwanoenyent, or Flying Heads, Cyclones, and 
Whirlwinds, of the Genonsgwa, or Stone Coats (the Frost Giants, 
or Gods of Winter, but originally named Tawiskaron), and of the 
S'hagodiyoweqgowa, or Wind God, purport to relate historical events, 
although they are mythic and legendary in form. But unlettered 
peoples do not transmit history. The writing of history presuppose^ 
not only the art of writing but also some kind of permanent social 
and political organization. Individual experiences fade rapidly, for 
lacking the needful general interest thev do not unite with others in 
forming even some pha.se of the locaj history of a group. The ex- 
periences of individuals and even of small unimportant groups of 
people also lack the interest necessary to bring about their trans- 
mission as history. Hence such uncivilized peoples leave to their 
posterity no authentic accounts of the events of their times, for only 
in song and saga, where poetry mingles with fact, do they attempt to 
transmit the narratives of historical events and experiences. 

But with the organization and development of society into greater 
complexity of social and governmental organization there arises 
the need for the transmission of a record of tribal or communal ex- 
94615°— 18 5 



66 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. amn. 32 

periences in which a certain number of persons are intensely inter- 
ested — tribal wars, feats and acts and sayings of great leaders and 
reformers, and other noteworthy public events claim permanency of 
record, and thus history is written. 

Popular tradition treats historical events in a nai've poetical way, 
and authentic historical experiences may thus be preserved. Through 
poetic treatment oral tradition becomes legend, so that one of the 
clearest criterions of legend is the fact that it frequently relates 
things that are not credible. Legend is the tradition of men who 
have not the art of writing and is a particular form of poetic narra- 
tive. So that in origin and nature history differs from legend 
because of difference of spheres of interest. Private and personal 
affairs and experiences and things that are of some interest to the 
common people and heroes, great personages, and public events and 
affairs are made attractive to the popular minds by means of poetic 
treatment. Legend is oral tradition in use among folk who do not 
make use of writing or other graphic art to secure permanency of 
record, while history is the written record of events and achievements 
and thoughts of men, which always presupposes the existence and 
the practice of graphic or scrii^torial art. 

Now, oral tradition, or legend, is not transmitted without im- 
portant variation in details from generation to generation, and 
so it is an untrustworthy medium for the conveyance of historical 
events. 

The saga, or popular story, may become sacred legend — that is, a 
characteristically " sacred " narrative about the " first people," or 
the gods — or it may remain simply a story or tale. These two 
classes of story or narrative had specific names among the Seneca 
and their congeners of the Iroquoian stock. The sacred legend was 
called Ka'kda\ or Kd'hara' by the r-using dialects of the Iroquoian 
tribes. The literal meaning of this noun is not known ; in the Onon- 
daga dialect the A;-.sound would be replaced by the g'-sound. These 
legends are " sacred " to the extent that they would not be related 
except during certain seasons of the year for the fear of breaking a 
religious taboo, forbidding strictly the telling of this class of nar- 
rative. The transgression of this prohibition was punished by the 
offended and vexed " first people," concernipg whom the myths or 
stories are related, although modern story-tellers, with scarce an 
exception, who have forgotten the true and logical reason for the 
inhibition mistakenly declare that the aforesaid penalty would be 
inflicted by the toads or snakes or by some other subtle animal. 

The myths of the American Indian refer to an order of things 
which preceded the present order, and to a race of man-beings who 
dwelt first in the world above the sky and later in small number only 
on this earth and who wei'e the so-called " first people," " the ancients." 



hewito] intkoduction 67 

It is evident that myths of origins pi-oject backward to an assumed 
condition of tilings the story of a day or of a year, and creation is 
described as Sjiring on a universal scale, that is, it explains the man- 
ner in which the order of things, existent where the stories are told, 
came about, as a Rebirth of Nature. But no one will contend that 
there were human eyewitnesses of what the narratives report. 

The wise men, prophets, and priests of tribal men painted these 
tales with the glamour and witchery of poeti-y. Myths are the poetic 
judgments of tribal men about the phenomena of life and the outside 
world and embody the philosophy of these men about the problems 
and mysteries of the universe around them and in their own lives. 
So, in order to understand these narratives, it is necessary to study 
them with the deepest sympathy. But our sympathy with the view- 
jaoint of the myth narratives of tribal men should not veil the realities 
of science from our minds. 

Piloted by science in seeking to know the truth about the universe, 
scholars do not expect to discover it in the myth-lore or the folk- 
lore of tribal men. To study the birth and the growth of opinions 
forms one of the most instructive chapters in the science of mind or 
psychology. 

The Seneca name S'hagodiiowe"g6wa or S'hagodiiowe'qgowa des- 
ignates one of the famous " man-beings " who are of the lineage of 
the " first people." Some unknowing Indian interpreters render this 
term erroneously by the English words " false face," which is a trans- 
lation which effectually conceals the literal meaning of the expression, 
which is freely " The Great Ones Who Defend Them." But as an 
appellative the term is also applied to a single one of these fictitious 
beings. The plural concept is evidently a late development, and 
probably arose aiter the establishment of societies whose members, 
when ceremonially attired, must for one thing wear a wooden mask 
having as its essential mark a wry mouth. So it is clear that the ex- 
pression " false face " applies to the members of such societies and not 
at all to the man-beings so impersonated. The Iroquoian myth of 
Creation knows only one man-being, who assumed the duty of pro- 
tecting mankind from pestilence and disease. He was the God of the 
Air or the Wind, sometimes appearing as the Whirlwind. Cere- 
monially he is addressed as S^hedwdso'dd'' or as Et^hi^so'da'', both 
meaning " He Who Is Our Grandfather." 

It would seem that the pluralizing of the concept has resulted in 
a marked forgetting of the original objective reality represented in 
the concept, which in turn detracts from the high esteem in which 
the original Wind God was held. The Onondaga name of this per- 
sonage is Haclu'T; the Mohawk, Akoii'wdrcV. Both these names 
have arisen from something peculiar to members of the so-called 
" False J'ace Societies," the first meaning, from the common postures 



68 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 3i 

assumed by the members, " hunch-backed," and the second, " mask," 
from the wooden mask worn by the members of the society when in 
session. So the expression of the evil side of the manifestations of 
the Power of the Wind or Air. Pestilence, Disease, and Death may 
safely be predicated of this member of the " first people." 

A god or deity exerts or maintains its influence over the mind and 
heart of man because it is something more than a mere creature of 
the human brain. The god exercises certain attributes, peculiarities 
and forces which place him outside the sphere of human knowledge 
and experience and competence into a class by himself: he embodies 
in himself, according to belief, the power to function as a process or 
force of the universe plus the attributed human faculties and aspect. 

Some of the French writers among the early explorers in North 
America refer to a native belief in " the ancients of animals," M-hich, 
it was stated, were regarded as the tyi>e and the progenitors of each 
particular species of animal. But this statement gives only a glimpse 
of a larger faith. These so-called " ancients of animals " were indeed 
only a part of the great company of " the ancients," " the ancestors," 
or " the first people," each being a personified element or process of 
life or of outside nature, who became by fated metamorphosis the 
i-eputed progenitors of all faunal and floral life on the earth. 

But an interpretative understanding of the Genesis myth of the 
American Indians shows that these " ancients." these primal " an- 
cestors," were regarded as " human beings," as belonging to that class 
of animate beings to which the Indian himself belonged. Yet, these 
" ancients " were the " gods," " the beings," or "the existences," of 
anthropic form, character, and volition, whose metamorphosis later 
produced, according to the Indian philosophy, the present order of 
things on earth. So, the " first beings," conceived as " human beings," 
were indeed the gods — the personified agents of the powers, processes, 
and phenomena of nature. 

It is this principle of transformation, or metamorphosis, that in 
part explains why there are represented largely " anthropic gods " 
with " animal masks " in Central America, Mexico, India, China, 
Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria, and not many true " animal gods " 
with " human masks." 

But in some places there arose confusion between these poetic cre- 
ations of a childlike faith and the lineal ancestors of men. When 
pride of birth and of position dominated the minds of aristocratic 
men they sought to trace their pedigree to the gods, and so they 
blindly claimed descent from these primal gods, who, in tlieir an- 
thropic aspect, were mere fictions of the mind, and so in time and in 
some lands this process resulted in what is usually called " ancestor 
worship." This is, therefore, never a primitive faith, but only a 
decadent culture. 



^^^l^] INTRODUCTION 69 

All early men of inchoate mentation, of solf-centererl thinking, 
shared their needs and afflictions, their woes and ambitions, their suf- 
ferings and aspirations, and their joys and blessings with their gods, 
feeling that their gods who bore their own likeness by the unconscious 
imputation of human nature to tliem were endowed with the attri-' 
butes, whims, virtues, and frailties of human nature. They believed 
that their gods must be men — man-beings, men like themselves — else 
these deities could not foresee and understand their necessities and 
£0 could not sympathize with men everywhere. Hence an Iroquois, 
thinking and speaking of their deities only in ■terms of human speech 
and thought, designates a god or other spirit of his faith by the word 
denoting man, human being, or mankind. 

Of the gods and deities of Iroquois myths the editor has written : 

Like most American Iiidinn mytholiifiies, the IroqnoiMii deals with three great 
mythic cosmical periods. In the first dwelt a race of gigantic anthropic heings — 
man-beiiigs. let them be called, beciuise though the.v were reputed to have been 
larger, purer, wiser, more ancient, and possessed of more potent orenda (q. v.), 
than man, and h.nving superior ability to perform the great elemental functions 
characterizing definitely the things represented by them, they nevertheless had 
the form. mien, and mind of man, their creator; for unconsciously did man 
create the gods, the great primal beings of cosmic time — the controllers or 
directors, or impersonations, of the bodies and phenomena of nature — in his 
own image. To these man-beings, therefore, were imputeil the thought, manners, 
customs, habits, and social organization of their creators; uotwithsfamling this, 
man regarded them as uncreated, eternal, and immortal ; for by a curious para- 
dox, man, mistaking his own mental fictions, his metajihors. for realities, ex- 
plained his own existence, wisdoiu, and activities as the (tivine product of the 
creations of his own inchoate mind. The dwelling-place of the first great primal 
beings, characterized by flora and fauna respectively identical with the plant 
and animal life appearing later on the earth, was conceived to have been the 
upper surface of the visible sky, which was regarded as a solid plain. Here 
lived the first bein.gs in peace and contentment for a very long period of time : 
no one knows or ever knew the length of this first cosmic period of tranquil 
existence. But there came a time when an event occurred which resulted in 
a metamorphosis ia the state and aspect of cele.stial and earthly things: in 
fact, the seeming had to become or to assume the real, and so came to pass th? 
cataclysmic change of things of the first period into that now seen on the earth 
and in the sky, and the close of this period was the dawn of the gods of this 
mythology,' 

So the character and the nature of the deities and spirits of the 
faith of the Iroquois peoples were a direct reflex of those attriinites 
of the people themselves. It may be inferred in general that the more 
primitive and cultureless the people are the more crude, the more 
barbaric and savage will be their conceptions of their gods and the 
nature and functions of these naive cre:ttions. but, conversely, it is 
only with the possession of a higher degree of intelligence that come 
nobler, more refined, grander, and more spiritual ideas of their gods. 
This admits of no exception. 

■ Handbook of American iDdlans, pt. 2, p. 720. 



70 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [etb ann. 32 

Whatever, therefore, the final terms are in which men at any time 
and place define their deities, the premises of their reasoning about 
them is always quite the same — namely, to define the unknown man 
in terms of the known men themselves — but this known quantity, 
man, is variable and inconstant, changing with time and place. All 
powers and functions and attributes of mind and body, inherent in 
man and distinctive of him — no matter whether beneficent or evil — 
men imputed to their gods in more or less idealized form. 

Guided by inchoate reasoning, the crude thinking of unscientific 
minds, all early men, responsive to external stimuli and the internal 
yearning for truth, ascribed to their gods and spirits not only all 
human functions and attributes measurably idealized, but also all 
their arts and social and religious institutions were likewise attrib- 
uted, probably quite unconsciously, to their gods and deities. These 
anthropic features and activities and anthropopathic mind were not 
ascribed, of course, to other men, but rather to the so-called " first 
people " — the personified, animated and humanized phenomena and 
processes of nature, of the environments of their experience. Thus, 
the social and institutional oi-ganization of the gods becomes a some- 
what idealized epitome or refiex of the human society as it existed 
and exists among the people in whose minds these divine oi'ganiza- 
tions had their origin. By so doing men painted, either consciously 
or unconsciously, in their religious activities and in their god-lore 
a faithful picture of the earliest culture and civilization of their own 
ethnic progenitors. 

Hence, when authentic historical records are wanting the student 
may by close and sympathetic analysis and interpretation of the 
myths and the religion of a people acquire a fairly accurate knowl- 
edge of the history and culture of such a people. In this manner, 
indeed, the gods verily become the revealers of all history and the 
teachers of the arts and crafts and industries and the true founders 
of the institutions — human and divine — to that people. In this in- 
teraction of the human mind with the forces and phenomena of life 
and environing nature lies the true source of inspiration and proph- 
ecy. The history of the gods is the history of man. Because the 
gods, in general, symbolize imiversal processes in life and nature 
they and their attributes and functions in time become more or less 
highly idealized creations of the conscious, the subconscious, and the 
superconscious thinking of men. 

The lesson of these myths and legends is that man is other than 
the material world ; that while he is in it he is not of it ; that while 
he feels nature's elemental activities impelling him and impinging 
on his senses, his apprehensive yearning heart sees the beckoning 
finger of a higher and nobler destiny. 



RD 14.8 (f 



CCHriN, 



] INTRODUCTION 71 



All bodies of myths agree perfectly on one fundamental principle, 
transformation, through which all things on this earth have become 
what they are. 

This principle of metamorphosis indicates the mental process by 
which these things were represented as becoming what they seemed 
to be — animated things, subjectively endowed with human form, 
thought, and volition, to explain the phenomena of life and sur- 
rounding nature. 



I desire to record here my grateful acknowledgment of the assist- 
ance rendered by Mr. F. W. Hodge, ethnologist in charge of the 
Bureau of American Ethnology, in the form of valuable suggestions 
in connection with the work and in other ways. I wish also to 
express my appreciation of the courtesy of Messrs. Little, Brown & 
Co., of Boston, in giving the bureau permission to use freely the 
material contained in the instructive " Introductions " written by the 
late Jeremiah Curtin for his interesting books, published by that 
company under the titles: ''Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, 
Western Slavs, and Magyars"; "Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland"; 
" Hero-Tales of Ireland " ; and " Creation Myths of Primitive 
America." 






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